I was getting 59-60 fps and game was going great (Persona 4). Then after I rebooted my machine everything is at 25-30 fps. I cannot think of anything I did to bring on this problem. Running Arch Linux. My pcsx2 build is:

0.9.9.0 svn 03-22-12

My hardware is core I7 processor, nvidia gtx 560m 1.5 gb ddr5 graphics card, 16gb ddr3 ram (running the binary driver; not the open source one). I am at a total loss at what to do. Here is a pastie for the console output:

That brought the fps fluctuation from 25-40 back up to 45-60. It is staying at real time most of the time now. I have not looked at the dependency tree for the dependencies of pcsxs2-svn so I am not sure exactly which package is the culprit yet.

Another problem I ran into this time was with zerospu2 audio plugin. It started crackling and slowed the whole operation down. So I went back to spu2-x and that seemed to fix it for the most part but fps is still slower then it was before in Final Fantasy 12.

@Squall Leonhart

My cpu is throttling? Is that what you mean? Did you get that from the console output? Can you direct me to the portion of the output that says that so I know what to look out for next time? I am really new to pcsx2 so any input at all would be helpful.

Yeah they must have. That is the only thing I can think of. By useless mpeg do you mean "lib32-mpg123"? I just checked and it does not seem to be a dependency of anything. I think I pulled it in for some wine game or something. Do you think removing it would help? Also, I read in another post that enabling pgo in the build would give something like 10% performance increase. I looked at the PKGBUILD:

PGO (if you can run it because it conflict with gsdx as far as I remenber), create you an intermediate version. You must run the intermediate version for severals hours with differents games. And then rebuild the intermediate version with the data collected. It is a bit more complicated that to add a switch on gcc option.

Updated all packages and before rebuilding nvidia related utilities I tested and everything is working correctly again. I checked all of the package versions and they are exactly the same. All in my local cache. Nothing new to download at all. Nothing of particular interest in my xorg log or dmesg either. Very strange. Not the first time I have experienced something like this in gnu (Arch especially) but weird none the less. Marking thread as solved. Thanks.

@gregory

I am still interested in this whole pgo thing. How complex is it? Is there a tutorial or examples on this anywhere? I found these: